![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Remember what Mark Twain said about rivers? I don't, exactly, either, but basically, they move. You can beat them up and move th8em around, but some day they will move again . . .
Local example.
Local example.
This is the last time I take Truffle to the river until the rainy season makes it inhospitable for people to sleep and shit in the riverbed. This is the third time I have had to wash suspiciously nasty feces out of her ruff, and I'm not going to put myself in the position again. This time it was so bad that when I had washed her and washed her in the river prior to going home -- and even used sand to scrub -- and stopped at the pet store and used their cleanup stuff on her, I still had to drive home with the windows down and give her a thorough bath when we got home. Ick.
It's really hard to find good summer places for offleash dog play around here. Most places are infested with foxtail and ticks (though both are better later in the summer when the grasses all fall over), and the beaches are infested with tourists. I had hoped to take up the slack with the river, but clearly this is not an option.
It's really hard to find good summer places for offleash dog play around here. Most places are infested with foxtail and ticks (though both are better later in the summer when the grasses all fall over), and the beaches are infested with tourists. I had hoped to take up the slack with the river, but clearly this is not an option.
It's been raining. Since Friday.
Generally, the rain is about over, as I observed recently, but this isn't freak rain, just a bit unusual.
The river is up a couple of inches: I can tell because when I go to cross over from the bank to the sand bar at the place where I could just step over last week, I have to wade this week.
Redwing blackbirds are very happy with this state of affairs, and so are the dogs (I have the temporary dog again this week). I just wish Truffle wouldn't get all excited about rolling in unidentifiable feces. Duck, I hope, but there's no reason to think so.
What else? Spent the afternoon attempting to replace my phone. Finally succeeded by giving up and going to Radio Shack for a "go phone" and sticking my sim card into it.
My lovely, lovely Palm Centro had a serious flaw -- the keylock didn't work. When I was out at Snapshot Day getting water samples, the phone simply died. No, it wasn't wet, though the day was: my pocket was dry. What happened was that the phone decided it was hotsynching with the computer and put on a hissy fit because it couldn't locate the computer in my pocket. It refused to stop trying. Half hour later, it was dead. I thought, well, I charged it last night, but it could be that it was not well connected. So I tried charging it again when I got home. All it did was get hot.
It was a real drag because as usual, once we got out into the field we had some real questions and we couldn't call the hub to get the answers so I had to wing it. I did wing it though, and it was all right. Moore Creeek is beautiful. That's the creek -- for you locals and semi-locals who might be interested -- that originates on the University campus, in the Great Meadow up behind the Arboretum. It skirts the lower edge of the arboretum and wanders through the residential neighborhood directly below the campus, through Meder Street Park and I'm not sure where it ends up -- Antonelli Pond? Dissipating into the karst?
At Meder Street Park the poison oak leaves are as big as your hand. It's really a beautiful, beautiful plant, with infinite variety in leaf form and growth habit. It was a true, brilliant leaf green -- not flame red as it will be in late summer. And it was blooming, delicate spathes sort of like the flower-things grape vines make. It's funny, how poison oak is so irritating to a lot of people -- to the point of being life-threatening for a few people -- when it is a key player in the riparian habitat. It's a pioneer in disturbed ground, for one thing, and acts as a nursemaid to trees like oak and black walnut. It provides a home for a lot of native animals (and plants and fungi!), and food as well for those who can use it. I think it's not irritating to very many other animals besides humans, but I don't know that for sure.
So, my phone -- I went to the phone store, and the news was awful. One, there's no guarantee your phone will actually work unless you pony up for the insurance. Two, if you try to buy a phone earlier than your anniversary, the phones cost hundreds of dollars. Three, all of the phones are really annoying. I liked my phone except for the keylock thing and the fact that I couldn't get anyone to explain how the music functions worked and the fact that it died less than a year after I got it and the fact that the phone company's international calling people accused me of fraud when I tried to get that turned on. If the whole company was like Luis at the local office, I'd have a working phone. But all of the phones available had doodads I didn't want or were hard to use or just plain stupid and delicate. And my phone has been discontinued and there are only seven of them anywhere. I wonder if everybody else had the same experience as me?
Luis said if I wasn't sure I wanted to get any of the ones there, I should go get the go phone at Radio Shack. So for twenty dollars I have a phone with no bells or whistles, but since the bells and whistles haven't really panned out for me, I guess it's okay.
Radio Shack was discontinuing a nice little digital camera, takes an SD card and AA batteries, 12X optical zoom and 10 megapixels, for $200. I got it. I think it's a nice little camera: it has a panorama function I don't quite understand, but which looks useable.
I wanted a fast camera, but I think it's not, really. But time will tell. And you have to give on some features to get others.
Also, I have three horseradish plants I have been growing from a slice of horseradish. Soon I will plant them. In a year or so I will harvest one of them and root another slice of it. And my grapes are blooming, and I have enough baby lettuce in the garden to have a salad every couple days from it.
Soon, cherries.
Generally, the rain is about over, as I observed recently, but this isn't freak rain, just a bit unusual.
The river is up a couple of inches: I can tell because when I go to cross over from the bank to the sand bar at the place where I could just step over last week, I have to wade this week.
Redwing blackbirds are very happy with this state of affairs, and so are the dogs (I have the temporary dog again this week). I just wish Truffle wouldn't get all excited about rolling in unidentifiable feces. Duck, I hope, but there's no reason to think so.
What else? Spent the afternoon attempting to replace my phone. Finally succeeded by giving up and going to Radio Shack for a "go phone" and sticking my sim card into it.
My lovely, lovely Palm Centro had a serious flaw -- the keylock didn't work. When I was out at Snapshot Day getting water samples, the phone simply died. No, it wasn't wet, though the day was: my pocket was dry. What happened was that the phone decided it was hotsynching with the computer and put on a hissy fit because it couldn't locate the computer in my pocket. It refused to stop trying. Half hour later, it was dead. I thought, well, I charged it last night, but it could be that it was not well connected. So I tried charging it again when I got home. All it did was get hot.
It was a real drag because as usual, once we got out into the field we had some real questions and we couldn't call the hub to get the answers so I had to wing it. I did wing it though, and it was all right. Moore Creeek is beautiful. That's the creek -- for you locals and semi-locals who might be interested -- that originates on the University campus, in the Great Meadow up behind the Arboretum. It skirts the lower edge of the arboretum and wanders through the residential neighborhood directly below the campus, through Meder Street Park and I'm not sure where it ends up -- Antonelli Pond? Dissipating into the karst?
At Meder Street Park the poison oak leaves are as big as your hand. It's really a beautiful, beautiful plant, with infinite variety in leaf form and growth habit. It was a true, brilliant leaf green -- not flame red as it will be in late summer. And it was blooming, delicate spathes sort of like the flower-things grape vines make. It's funny, how poison oak is so irritating to a lot of people -- to the point of being life-threatening for a few people -- when it is a key player in the riparian habitat. It's a pioneer in disturbed ground, for one thing, and acts as a nursemaid to trees like oak and black walnut. It provides a home for a lot of native animals (and plants and fungi!), and food as well for those who can use it. I think it's not irritating to very many other animals besides humans, but I don't know that for sure.
So, my phone -- I went to the phone store, and the news was awful. One, there's no guarantee your phone will actually work unless you pony up for the insurance. Two, if you try to buy a phone earlier than your anniversary, the phones cost hundreds of dollars. Three, all of the phones are really annoying. I liked my phone except for the keylock thing and the fact that I couldn't get anyone to explain how the music functions worked and the fact that it died less than a year after I got it and the fact that the phone company's international calling people accused me of fraud when I tried to get that turned on. If the whole company was like Luis at the local office, I'd have a working phone. But all of the phones available had doodads I didn't want or were hard to use or just plain stupid and delicate. And my phone has been discontinued and there are only seven of them anywhere. I wonder if everybody else had the same experience as me?
Luis said if I wasn't sure I wanted to get any of the ones there, I should go get the go phone at Radio Shack. So for twenty dollars I have a phone with no bells or whistles, but since the bells and whistles haven't really panned out for me, I guess it's okay.
Radio Shack was discontinuing a nice little digital camera, takes an SD card and AA batteries, 12X optical zoom and 10 megapixels, for $200. I got it. I think it's a nice little camera: it has a panorama function I don't quite understand, but which looks useable.
I wanted a fast camera, but I think it's not, really. But time will tell. And you have to give on some features to get others.
Also, I have three horseradish plants I have been growing from a slice of horseradish. Soon I will plant them. In a year or so I will harvest one of them and root another slice of it. And my grapes are blooming, and I have enough baby lettuce in the garden to have a salad every couple days from it.
Soon, cherries.
Tags:
A few days ago I first realized that the riverbed is about half dry now, which is damned early. It's kind of cool for the dog -- dogs, actually, because I have the brother-in-law's clueless dog Roxy for another almost two weeks -- because the dry part of the riverbed is glorious to run around on and the river is running slow and safe and shallow so they can wade to their heart's delight. There are flowers blooming in that sand I swear I have never seen before, though they are vaguely reminiscent of other natives and other thugs I have seen before. There's something growing there with a sweet fragrance, too, though I was never able to spot what it was.
Other signs of summer: the Watsonville hillsides are totally brown. The seedheads on the extoci wild grasses are ripe or nearly ripe. We've gotten our yearly water warning. But this year it's more than a warning: we're on stage 2 water restrictions, which are not onerous but are more ominous. We can only water on 2 days a week, depending onoiur house number (or other named factors if those don't apply), before 10 and after 5, except you can always use drip or a wateriung can or a shutoff hose. What's left? sprinklers and open hose ends, that's all. You can always water food crops if you need to, if you use a watering can or a shutoff.
This is the third dry year in a row. Not so dry in itself: 76% of normal. But last year was a nearly-not-dry 81%, and the year before 50-something.
There's nothing unusual about this. As the nice fellow used to say, if you bet every year that it would be drier than average, you would make money over the long run. And not so long run, actually.
But we did get spoiled with about a decade of good wet years, green and juicy, and we got out of the habit of worrying about our water. Or some of us did, anyways.
Other signs of summer: the Watsonville hillsides are totally brown. The seedheads on the extoci wild grasses are ripe or nearly ripe. We've gotten our yearly water warning. But this year it's more than a warning: we're on stage 2 water restrictions, which are not onerous but are more ominous. We can only water on 2 days a week, depending onoiur house number (or other named factors if those don't apply), before 10 and after 5, except you can always use drip or a wateriung can or a shutoff hose. What's left? sprinklers and open hose ends, that's all. You can always water food crops if you need to, if you use a watering can or a shutoff.
This is the third dry year in a row. Not so dry in itself: 76% of normal. But last year was a nearly-not-dry 81%, and the year before 50-something.
There's nothing unusual about this. As the nice fellow used to say, if you bet every year that it would be drier than average, you would make money over the long run. And not so long run, actually.
But we did get spoiled with about a decade of good wet years, green and juicy, and we got out of the habit of worrying about our water. Or some of us did, anyways.
Truffle and I spent over two hours mucking around on the river this afternoon. I guess I've forgiven the lupines. They didn't make me cry. Other things did, but not the lupines or the poppies or the other flowers. Truffle was so happy she could have written the definition for happy dog. There were squirrels to chase, and birds to stalk, and dogs to say hello to (the usual grumpy asshole with a leashed undersocialized dog who doesn't say "my dog has a problem" and also doesn't notice that his dog with the supposed problem doesn't really offer to tear my dog's throat out when she approaches and doesn't notoice that my dog walks away without offering to escalate the small growl the other dog offers her, but is sure that I've done something terrible even though nothing happens and Truffle and I go our way and he goes his way: I could understand it if I didn't control my dog when I see that something's up, or if the other dog actually tried to start a fight, but nothing happened and the crazy bystander who chided me for not having an aggressive dog on a leash shouldn't bother me because he's crazy and neither dog was aggressive, but oh well).
Really the day was lovely, lovely. The water was running fresh and clear and I went wading in it! My (Ted's) pants are too narrow at the ankles to roll them up properly -- must wear shorts next time -- so I waded in without and got wet to the knees. The riverbed looks like a pristine mountain stream (I know it really isn't, don't worry)with a nice natural array of silt, sand, gravel and cobbles, sand bars down the center and two fast-moving channels on the sides. The water is clear and sparkling (it looks brown from a distance but only because you can see clear to the bottom). The nasty invasive weeds are blooming beautifully. The broom is covered in yellow blossoms, the radish is ruffly and sweet. The clouds are ruffly and fluffy like in children's books too. Just gorgeous.
And the levee is so well used. I remember when it was just a disheartening garbage heap. Now there's a simple asphalt path at the top of the levee with paved walkways connecting it to the pedestrian bridges over the river and to the street that runs by. There's a little planting going on, largely natives and a few "near-natives" that can take the urban conditions. Every time I go there I pass (very) young mothers with strollers, street folks, day laborers with their bicycles and lunches and beer, skaters, business guys from the County building on the other side of the river or from the offices downtown across the street: this time I was most fortunate to run into a guy who was passionate about rivers and fish and soils and water tables: just an accountant, a bean counter he called himself, but he used to be a fanatic fisherman and now he works for an environmental firm that analyzes storm water down South. Nice long conversation full of history and biology and hydrology.
What else we saw: a large area of the bank was cordoned off with yellow tape. The kind that reads "Police Line Do Not Cross." There was a huge van and two smaller vehicles belonging to the police department, a gazebo-tent like people use to set up booths at craft fairs, and about twenty people, some in uniform, maybe more, and I think six dogs. I almost didn't even ask, figuring they wouldn't tell me, but the appointed spokesperson said they were looking for skeletal remains. Then he gave me a look like "I know you know there's more to it and you want to ask me more questions but that's all I'm going to tell you." I spent a half a minute trying to think of a question I could ask that he could answer and went on.
Of course I kept Truffle on the leash the whole time we were anywhere near the search dogs.
My in-laws gave me a bareroot blueberry and a bareroot boysenberry for my birthday. Jason (the son-in-law-elect) is taking me tomorrow to buy moar winebarrels and some stuff to make an arbor. I have decided that moar winebarrels is the entire solution to the water table issue and to some degree the daylight issue too. A half barrel gives more than two feet of elevation, putting the plant that much farther from the water and that much closer to the sun. Wins all around. Also wine barrels are relatively inexpensive as planters go, easy to handle, and to my eye, they look at least as good as any purpose-built raised bed and better than most pottery. And they're recycled -- I don't know why the wineries have to get rid of them. But I do know we have an awful lpot of wineries around here these days which makes me wonder a bit as wineries are pretty demanding in terms of water and so on. Anyway, wine barrels it is.
But right now, I keep getting mad again, or rather bereft to the point of going to bed and crying myself to sleep, because as of this week I will never, never,never be three years younger than the nice fellow again, and it's just something I can't wrap my mind around.
Really the day was lovely, lovely. The water was running fresh and clear and I went wading in it! My (Ted's) pants are too narrow at the ankles to roll them up properly -- must wear shorts next time -- so I waded in without and got wet to the knees. The riverbed looks like a pristine mountain stream (I know it really isn't, don't worry)with a nice natural array of silt, sand, gravel and cobbles, sand bars down the center and two fast-moving channels on the sides. The water is clear and sparkling (it looks brown from a distance but only because you can see clear to the bottom). The nasty invasive weeds are blooming beautifully. The broom is covered in yellow blossoms, the radish is ruffly and sweet. The clouds are ruffly and fluffy like in children's books too. Just gorgeous.
And the levee is so well used. I remember when it was just a disheartening garbage heap. Now there's a simple asphalt path at the top of the levee with paved walkways connecting it to the pedestrian bridges over the river and to the street that runs by. There's a little planting going on, largely natives and a few "near-natives" that can take the urban conditions. Every time I go there I pass (very) young mothers with strollers, street folks, day laborers with their bicycles and lunches and beer, skaters, business guys from the County building on the other side of the river or from the offices downtown across the street: this time I was most fortunate to run into a guy who was passionate about rivers and fish and soils and water tables: just an accountant, a bean counter he called himself, but he used to be a fanatic fisherman and now he works for an environmental firm that analyzes storm water down South. Nice long conversation full of history and biology and hydrology.
What else we saw: a large area of the bank was cordoned off with yellow tape. The kind that reads "Police Line Do Not Cross." There was a huge van and two smaller vehicles belonging to the police department, a gazebo-tent like people use to set up booths at craft fairs, and about twenty people, some in uniform, maybe more, and I think six dogs. I almost didn't even ask, figuring they wouldn't tell me, but the appointed spokesperson said they were looking for skeletal remains. Then he gave me a look like "I know you know there's more to it and you want to ask me more questions but that's all I'm going to tell you." I spent a half a minute trying to think of a question I could ask that he could answer and went on.
Of course I kept Truffle on the leash the whole time we were anywhere near the search dogs.
My in-laws gave me a bareroot blueberry and a bareroot boysenberry for my birthday. Jason (the son-in-law-elect) is taking me tomorrow to buy moar winebarrels and some stuff to make an arbor. I have decided that moar winebarrels is the entire solution to the water table issue and to some degree the daylight issue too. A half barrel gives more than two feet of elevation, putting the plant that much farther from the water and that much closer to the sun. Wins all around. Also wine barrels are relatively inexpensive as planters go, easy to handle, and to my eye, they look at least as good as any purpose-built raised bed and better than most pottery. And they're recycled -- I don't know why the wineries have to get rid of them. But I do know we have an awful lpot of wineries around here these days which makes me wonder a bit as wineries are pretty demanding in terms of water and so on. Anyway, wine barrels it is.
But right now, I keep getting mad again, or rather bereft to the point of going to bed and crying myself to sleep, because as of this week I will never, never,never be three years younger than the nice fellow again, and it's just something I can't wrap my mind around.